Beards blooming in Boston

Oct. 23, 2013

Oct 19, 2013; Boston, MA, USA; Boston Red Sox first baseman Mike Napoli reacts after striking out against the Detroit Tigers during the fourth inning in game six of the American League Championship Series playoff baseball game at Fenway Park. Mandatory Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports / Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY

Written by

Ted Berg

USA TODAY

BOSTON — At World Series media day on Tuesday, Red Sox outfielder Quintin Berry stood out for his thoroughly unremarkable facial hair.

“This is about three weeks right here,” Berry said, stroking a few scant wisps on his chin. He blames genetics for his inability to fit in with his teammates. “My mama did it to me.”

Directly across from Berry sat Boston first baseman Mike Napoli, one of the earliest adopters of the facial hair that has come to define the club.

Like many of his teammates, Napoli keeps his mustache neat but lets his beard flow to lengths typically reserved for leather-clad bikers and the men of Duck Dynasty.

“It started in spring training,” Napoli recalls. “Me, Jonny (Gomes) and (Dustin) Pedroia were just messing around, saying we were going to grow it out all year. And it just seemed like everyone jumped on.”

After a brutal 2012 season that saw the Sox finish in last place in the AL East for the first time since 1992, the Red Sox seized an early lead in the division with an 18-8 record in April.

Baseball players are notoriously superstitious, and though no one on the Red Sox associated the team’s record with its hairiness on Tuesday, it’s hardly surprising that more and more of them grew out their whiskers as the club coasted toward the playoffs.

The beards have become a rallying point for the players, who take turns tugging on each other’s beards in celebration, and the team’s fans, many of whom now wear real or fake beards to games in the club’s honor.

Napoli’s beard is the gold standard for Red Sox players – “It’s beautiful,” said Berry – but plenty of his teammates will now take to baseball’s biggest stage looking far less dignified.

Starting pitcher Clay Buchholz’s best effort, a translucently thin group of brown patches on his face, drew smirks from some Red Sox on Tuesday.

“It’s kind of a white-trash beard,” said veteran catcher David Ross, whose own thick, graying beard merits comparisons to Civil War generals.

“He stuck with it,” outfielder Mike Carp says in Buchholz’s defense from behind a face full of flowing blond curls that make him look like a 19th-century philosopher. “It doesn’t matter what we look like. We’re doing it because we’re doing it as a team.”

Gomes, who according to Carp “came into spring training with a pretty fierce beard,” agrees that the quality of a player’s beard matters not, so long as it’s there.

“We don’t vote on it,” he says. “It’s either have a beard or don’t have a beard. We’re all tied for first.”

The so-called “playoff beard,” long a tradition in hockey, is nothing new in baseball, either.

But even by the bushy standards of recent World Series, the 2013 contest will likely be the most hirsute of all time. Nearly every player on both teams has some configuration of facial hair.